Summary
Deep Transitions is a framework for explaining long-term change across many of a society’s basic systems at once. Johan Schot and Laur Kanger set it out in the journal Research Policy in 2018. They propose that the systems behind modern life – energy, mobility, food – express “a limited number of meta-rules” that for 250 years have driven innovation in one direction. This First Deep Transition produced industrial modernity, with its wealth and its ecological and social costs.
Meeting those costs, they argue, needs a Second Deep Transition that changes the meta-rules themselves as well as the systems. The framework combines the Multi-Level Perspective with Carlota Perez’s techno-economic paradigms.
Rationale
Meta-rules do for energy, food and transport roughly what we suggest deep dispositions do for culture: set a shared direction beneath the surface. Theirs are rules of innovation; ours are habits of relating.